Majority of Americans support confirmation of Alito to Supreme Court

RICHARD MORINThe Washington Post

Published Thursday, December 22, 2005

WASHINGTON -- A majority of Americans now support the confirmation of U.S. Appeals Court Judge Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court to fill the seat of retiring Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

The survey found that 54 percent of the public say the Senate should confirm Alito while 28 percent say he should not be approved. That marks a modest increase in public support for Alito since November, when 49 percent said he should be confirmed and 29 percent said he should not. In both surveys, about one in five Americans said they did not yet know enough about the nominee to have an opinion.

Alito now is about as popular as Chief Justice John Roberts was on the eve of his Senate confirmation hearings in September, the survey found.

Roberts easily won Senate approval, breezing through his hearings and winning the vote of all 55 Republican senators and half of their Democratic colleagues.

It is uncertain whether Alito will pass so effortlessly through his Senate confirmation process, which is scheduled to start Jan. 9 with hearings.

The Senate hopes to hold a final vote on Alito by Jan. 20.

The new poll found some evidence that the abortion issue plays an important but not decisive role in shaping public perceptions of Alito.

While his current views on abortion are not publicly known, memos that he wrote two decades ago, while he was a lawyer in the Reagan administration Justice Department, indicated he opposed Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion.

Six in 10 say they hope Alito would vote to uphold Roe while just over a third say they want him to vote to overturn it.

But a majority of the public -- 55 percent -- said it was only of limited importance that Alito supported their position on abortion.

Seventeen percent said it was "extremely important" and 26 percent said it was "very important."

A total of 1,003 randomly selected adults were interviewed Dec. 15-18 for this survey.

Margin of sampling error for the overall results is plus or minus 3 percentage points.